Fujitsu Looks to Shed Notebook Pounds

The company's LifeBook S6510 is a four-pound notebook with a 14.1-inch display and 4.5 hours of battery life.

Fujitsu Computer Systems is looking to trim a few pounds off its notebook portfolio with a new four-pound enterprise laptop that offers a 14.1-inch display and 4.5 hours of battery life.
Fujitsu announced Nov. 20 that it would begin selling its LifeBook S6510 notebook later this month. This light-weight notebook looks to continue Fujitsus efforts to expand in the North American market by offering smaller and lighter laptops, ultra-mobile and ultra-portable PCs for those users on the go.

In the competitive notebook market, which will grow larger and more important next year as notebook sales look to overtake desktop sales in 2009, according to IDC, Fujitsu is looking to differentiate itself from the rest of the market by focusing on making its notebooks lighter and offering better battery life, said Paul Moore, senior director for mobile product marketing at Fujitsu.

"All the notebooks that are out there come with the same CPU, the same wireless ability and the same hard drive," Moore said. "What we are trying to do is differentiate ourselves on the screen size, the weight and the battery life."
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Another area that Fujitsu is making a difference in is price.
While several vendors, including Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba, are working to get the average sales price of their notebooks down, Fujitsus laptops tend to come at a premium. The starting price for the S6510 is $1,529, which includes an Intel Core 2 Duo 7250 that runs at 2GHz, 1GB of RAM, a hard disk drive with an 80GB capacity, support for 802.11 a/b/g WLAN (wireless LAN) technology and 4.5 hours of battery life.
Fujitsu is not the only vendor looking to reduce the weight of laptops. For example, HP offers a notebookthe HP Compaq 6910pthat weighs about 4.7 pounds and offers a 14.1-inch display and some of the same features as Fujitsus, such as an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, for a starting price of just under $1,600.
Still, despite the price tag and competition, Moore said Fujitsu is offering the type of technology that enterprise buyers cant get elsewhere.
"We are less worried about a mainstream notebook and more focused on innovation and trying different configurations that we believe our customers will respond to," he said.
Fujitsu is rolling out another notebook, the LifeBook S7210, which is slightly heavier at five pounds but offers a similar 14.1-inch display and the same array of Intel processors, memory configurations and hard disk drive options. The starting price for that notebook is about $1,300, Moore said.
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